The present invention relates to a magnetic resonance apparatus for scanning a part to be imaged, and a program applied to the magnetic resonance apparatus.
One method for detecting an uppermost end of a liver involves binarizing a coronal image including the liver and lungs. Since the lungs contain the air, they generally tend to yield lower-intensity signals than the liver. Therefore, a threshold for binarizing the coronal image so that tissue with low-intensity signals has a value of zero and that with high-intensity signals has a value of one is prepared, and the threshold is used to binarize the coronal image, whereby a binary image may be produced in which the lungs have a value of zero and the liver has a value of one. Since the lungs are zero and the liver is one in the binary image thus produced, the position at which the pixel value changes from zero to one may be detected to thereby find an uppermost end of the liver.
However, it is difficult in practice to define an optimal value of the threshold for assigning zero to the lungs and one to the liver, and part of pixels within the region of the lungs may be sometimes assigned with a value of one. Thus, there is a problem that an error in detecting the position of the uppermost end of the liver is increased in case that part of pixels in the region of the lungs are assigned with one, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the lungs and liver.
Therefore, there is a need for a technique with which an error in detecting the position of a part to be detected (for example, an uppermost end of the liver) may be minimized as much as possible.